When he walked into Lao Zhang’s hardware store, he was staring at his mobile phone in a daze.
The store has neat shelves, tape measures, wires, switches, and door locks, and the familiar smell of rust and plastic hangs in the air.
Lying in the corner is a box of dusty expansion screws that were purchased last year.
“Half a box was sold last month,” Lao Zhang looked up and smiled bitterly. “Ten years ago, this was not enough to sell in one day.”
This hardware street is getting older.
What was once the busiest stretch of road is now covered with five “transfer” notices.
There are only a few delivery tricycles, and the bosses are either playing on their mobile phones or playing chess and chatting next door.
Lao Li from the store next door simply opened up half of the storefront to sell fruit – hardware became a sideline and fruit became the main business.
This is not a case of a certain market.
The physical hardware market across the country is experiencing a silent ebb.
Many practitioners are confused: Where have all the customers gone?
The first is the chain reaction caused by the cooling of the real estate industry.
The hardware industry is deeply tied to the real estate market – new house decoration, second-hand house renovation, project procurement, the entire industry chain supports countless hardware stores.
After the property market entered an adjustment period, everyone in the chain felt the chill: the delivery volume of new homes fell, the number of orders received by decoration companies dropped sharply, and the demand for construction workers to obtain goods shrank simultaneously.
What’s even more troublesome is that the industry’s account period is getting longer and longer. Previously, the payment could be collected monthly, but now it is considered a good treatment to be settled in half a year, and there are even cases where the purchaser runs away directly.
Small hardware stores rely on capital turnover to maintain operations, and the financial pressure caused by account arrears makes operators more panicked than the decrease in orders.
The second impact comes from the diversion of traditional customer sources through online channels.
Ten years ago, plumbers who were short of spare parts had to go to offline stores to purchase them. Now, as long as they take out their mobile phones to take pictures and search for the same model, the e-commerce platform can deliver them to the construction site in two hours, and the price is 20% cheaper than offline.
Young people who decorate are more accustomed to buying complete sets of switches and sockets directly online, and ordering wires, tapes, and tools together without going to the hardware market to compare prices.
A merchant who has been doing wholesale for 20 years revealed that the purchase volume of a local head decoration company that he has cooperated with for many years was cut in half last year. The reason is that the company launched its own online purchasing platform and directly connected with manufacturers to obtain goods, skipping the middle wholesaler.
The third underlying reason is the change in residents’ consumption habits.
The older generation of owners are accustomed to purchasing materials themselves and paying attention to the site. Now, those born in the 1990s and 2000s are more inclined to choose the all-inclusive service of the decoration company. After signing the design drawings, all materials such as wires, water pipes, switch panels, etc. are purchased by the decoration company in one stop. It is difficult for hardware stores to break into this supply chain.
What’s even more cruel is that the “professional barriers” in the traditional hardware industry are disintegrating: in the past, consumers had to rely on store clerk recommendations to judge product quality. Now online evaluation videos and Xiaohongshu pitfall avoidance guides are detailed, and young people are more willing to refer to public evaluation content rather than offline store clerk recommendations.
Even for stores that are still operating, the business logic has been completely rewritten.
In the past, hardware stores relied on poor information to make profits, but now product prices are almost transparent. The first thing many customers do when entering a store is to turn on their mobile phones to compare prices on e-commerce platforms, without paying any attention to the additional costs of store rent and stocking up.
Profits in the industry have been compressed to the extreme. In the past, you could earn 10 yuan from selling a roll of wires, but now you have to provide door-to-door delivery services to earn 2 yuan.
A water pipe fittings merchant calculated accounts: monthly turnover is 100,000 yuan, gross profit is 20,000 yuan, after deducting rent, water and electricity of 8,000 yuan, and labor of 12,000 yuan, the remaining profit is not enough to cover the bad debts of the month.
What makes the industry even more anxious is that young people are generally unwilling to take over. There are almost no operators under the age of 40 in the entire hardware street. Many employees say that their children would rather work in emerging industries such as the Internet, and simply do not care about the income of traditional hardware stores.
However, amid the general depression, many practitioners who have taken the initiative to seek change have found new ways to survive.
Lao Zhou’s store also doesn’t have many individual customers, but the phone and WeChat orders are ringing off the hook: He has added the WeChat accounts of more than 500 local plumbers and posts inventory, prices, and new product information in the community every day. Workers who have needs can place orders directly on WeChat, and he can deliver them to the construction site in half an hour on an electric bike.
“In the past, we waited for customers to come to our door. Now we chase customers and provide good service. Customers will naturally be willing to cooperate in the long term.” Lao Zhou said.
Young operator Xiao Chen has a more novel idea. He transformed his store into a “hardware cafe” and put a coffee table at the door to sell coffee. Consumers can drink coffee while buying hardware, or purchase small pieces of hardware while drinking coffee. This cross-border model is used to attract young people who are accustomed to online consumption to the store, and then use cost-effective products to retain customers.
“It’s difficult to survive simply by selling hardware. Joining the cross-border business can at least survive first.” Xiao Chen said.
Practitioner Lao Zhao has completely given up on the retail track and concentrates on one-stop MRO (maintenance, repair, operation) supply for surrounding small factories: small factories need to purchase gloves, grinding wheels, wires, switches and other consumables every month in scattered categories. Factory managers do not have the energy to compare purchases one by one, so Lao Zhao provides an all-inclusive supply service and settles monthly. The price is slightly lower than retail but the advantage is the stable and large order volume.
Now he has more than 30 stable factory customers, with a fixed monthly turnover of 200,000 yuan, which is much more stable than doing individual business.
Many industry practitioners have realized that the shrinkage of the physical hardware market is not a cyclical trough, but a structural ebb: the excessive hardware stores spawned by the two decades of real estate gold are experiencing multiple impacts from e-commerce, new retail, decoration companies, and factory direct sales. The past business model of renting a store, purchasing goods, and waiting for customers to come to your door has become completely outdated.
But the demand for hardware itself will not disappear. The demand for house repairs, water pipe replacements, switch replacements, and tool updates will always exist, but the way to meet the needs has changed.
Lao Zhang also found a new direction. He began to learn to make short videos, teaching people to change faucets, install switch panels, and select wires of appropriate specifications. The content of the videos was simple, explaining practical skills while working.
After half a year, the number of fans is not large, but under each video, viewers ask for the store address and are willing to purchase from the store.
The way out for the physical hardware market has never been to miss the past, but to reconnect: reconnect with customer needs, re-adapt to changing consumption habits, and reintegrate into the business world that has been reshaped by the Internet.
The operators on this old street are exploring new ways of living in their own way. This traditional track is far from coming to an end.
